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| MRAs: Bigger Drama Queens than Batman |
Drama queens: so annoying, but so, so entertaining. Tammy Wynette, singing about failing marriages with that little choked-up quiver in her voice. Chris Crocker, begging us to “leave Britney alone!” Emo kids whining about whatever it is they’re always whining about. Cats, being cats.
And, of course, Men’s Rights activists, seriously in the running for biggest drama queens of all.
Over on A Voice For Men, guest blogger “Tom Snark” recently wrote about a little incident in his life in which he heard the woman who lived next door to him yell at her husband because she didn’t like the way he was trimming some branches.
Not much of a story, you’d think. But Snark, showing considerable ingenuity, stretched it out into a 1200 word post. The woman didn’t just yell; she “yapp[ed] at him like a menopausal Chihuahua.” The man wasn’t just embarrassed to have a neighbor overhear the exchange; he
know[s] that their facade of marital bliss was now forever shattered in my mind. … Is this his terrible secret, hidden from the world: that he is continually disrespected behind closed doors, by the very woman who said to him “I do”?
Needless to say, Snark answered this question with a resounding “yes.” And then decided that all marriages are like this — ultimately concluding that the women of the world are quite literally nagging their hubbies to death:
One needlessly stressful incident after another is sure to raise the blood pressure. But actually living with a person who does this, combined with the stress of full-time work five days a week? The origin of the life expectancy gap [between men and women] becomes clear.
Never mind that married men actually live longer than unmarried men, as approximately two seconds of Googling will show. Snark was just getting going:
marriage has no benefit at all for men. It is not even a stretch to say that, in this day and age, marriage is systematically abusive for men. While women can up and leave at any time they like, with minimal resistance from the law, family courts, or society as a whole (we continue to suffer from Eat, Prey, Love syndrome) – men cannot leave women without paying the price.
Yes, he did say “prey,” not “pray.” But wait, there’s more:
Married men are literally trapped, stuck supporting the poisonous predators that will eventually kill them. Plenty of women know this; perhaps this is why they are so keen on the idea. A little legal tweaking was all it took for feminists to remake marriage in their own image: men are now the dehumanised tools for women’s personal use. Sex roles have not simply been reversed, because men continue to do most of the work. What has changed is that the paycheque is now handed directly over to the wife, and his time at home will be spent completing endless ‘honey-do’ lists.
Oh, the terrible tyranny of the “honey-do” list! Hitler had nothing on these foul shrews and their endless branch-trimming demands!
Now, I don’t mean to make light of verbal abuse. It happens, and it’s real abuse. I once had a neighbor, an elderly Italian man, who was continually yelling at his wife. Most of it was in Italian, so I don’t know exactly what he was saying, but every sentence or two was punctuated by what was evidently his favorite English word, “asshole,” a word he delivered with so much contempt it was chilling. In between these verbal barrages, I could hear his wife softly responding, trying to placate him. I don’t think he physically abused her – he was in a wheelchair – but this verbal abuse was constant. I doubt there was a single day I didn’t hear it. Had I known then what I know now, I would have called the police.
But not every overheard argument is a sign of abuse. Snark has heard one nasty exchange in the ten years he’s lived next to this couple – and he’s concluded from this one data point not only that his neighbor is being abused but that virtually all married men are prisoners to “poisonous predators [who] will eventually kill them.”
Naturally, the regular commenters on A Voice For Men found this conclusion eminently reasonable. Indeed, in one heavily upvoted comment, Barbarossaaa managed to out-queen Snark’s already impressive drama queenery:
All one has to do is to observe these married men, i mean really look at them… dont let them catch you looking, observe the married man is his natural habitat, and if you look close you can see the dulled eyes of a man simply waiting to die.
he is the fly caught in the spider web, that has accepted its fate and stopped struggling. he now waits for the black widow to climb down and consume him slowly but surely…this is not freedom it’s subtle servitude … you are dancing her dance, she is the initiator you are the reactor, and SHE decides whether you pass or fail she is in complete control.
Yes, married men are all dead-eyed puppets in the hands of their evil wives. When I read this last bit, I couldn’t help but think of this little scene in Ed Wood’s perplexing bad-movie masterpiece Glen or Glenda, in which Bela Lugosi, himself a drama queen of considerable ability, shouts out “pull the string!” for no apparent reason:
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>Discount, explain why when women could work outside the home back in the ancient world, they worked at jobs like plumber which with sixty pound lead pipes to move around was not easy to do. Their names are found all over Rome and other Italian cities' lead pipe network.
>So explain their being plumbers.
>Nope, this took place over centuries, men could not have had centuries of other commitments. This was backbreaking, difficult and required a lot of technical skill since they were laying pipes to have the water reach private homes. Skill that required knowing math and other hard science things like physics.In other words Discount, you are unable to explain why women could do difficult, physically taxing work then (as they do now) because you lack the intelligence to understand this simple fact of life.
>Discount, you're banned, for obvious reasons. You can come back in a week and try to convince me I should let you post again but frankly that may take a but of persuasion. If you try to post anything before then, well, then you're banned forever. I've deleted the comments of yours that led to this ban, and some others. Sorry, folks, would have done it earlier but I was away from the internet for most of the evening.
>Damn it, it's really hard for me to piece together what was going on in this thread now.Could somebody tell me the gist of what was deleted? Please?
>That's a pity, I had a question for Discount. Not that he would have answered it.
>Sam, the gist of it is that Discount had a ragegasm and showed himself for the vomit-inducing creep that he is.
>@SamDiscount threw a tantrum because someone said that this thread was a good example of how nuts MRAs are.Discount started deleting posts (to avoid being that example of a nutty MRA) and saying "cunt" a lot.Discount threatened rape while using the royal "we" (while still saying "cunt" a lot).And then some other stuff I must have missed …
>But you get the cunt idea cunt. Right?
>@Darkside Cat (I am a brit…)Maybe but it's a lot less strictly controlled than child support. Miss a single payment and you are in breach, you need to really screw up visitations as a dominant parent in order to get hit with a permanent change in visitations. Apparently the agreement of child support is a legal binding document but the arranged visitations are not. Look, I am not a lawyer but if so many people are complaining and the main complaint from the Father's Rights movment is that they routinely lose touch with their kids because the assumption is that in a mediated divorce the visitation rights are equally enshrined as the child support. And I am sure more than 10% of men want to have custody. Do you really think men are so unwilling to care for their kids that just 10% want custody or do you think it's one of those things that no one bothers arguing?
>If Discount was a parody troll, he was a brilliant one. Very realistic meltdown.
>Gotta love the smug, dismissive language here, so typical of feminists. Whenever a man has a concern, he's "whining" or is a "drama queen". But when a woman says something? Ohh, you better believe it's important. There's some real nutjobs among the MRAs, sure, but some of the folks here are no slouches either. At least you acknowledge that verbal/emotional abuse is something that should be taken seriously and not made light of.
>And yet study after study shows that married men are healthier and happier, and that MEN are more eager to get married than are women.I suppose MRAs will argue that all those men are just stupid dupes. And then they'll tell us about how FEMINISTS are the ones who hold men in contempt. 😀
>Ion, if we seem dismissive of MRAs, it's often because we've heard their arguments before.That men are just naturally stronger and smarter than women in all (or just most) areas, that women don't want to do hard work, that women are just too 'emotional' to understand men's presumably logical brains, that all women secretly want to be raped, that men just can't stop themselves from sexually assaulting women in short skirts/low-cut tops…We call those kind of arguments BS because they are BS. It's like they're trying to explain to an engineer how a computer works when they can't even figure out how to open Microsoft Word, and expecting the engineer to take them seriously.
>Avi @ Discount::: Your major gripe with women is that you are incapable of treating them as equals. :::I think this could be tweaked slightly. To wit:Your major gripe with women is that they expect you to treat them as equals.
>Gotta love the smug, dismissive language here, so typical of feminists.It would be a crime if we were speaking to people whose ideas are worthy of being taken seriously.
>Ion, I think it is important to know the difference between nagging and verbal abuse. I see verbal abuse as being insulting, demeaning to the other person, and raising your tone and showing too much anger. When I get mad, I try to get away from a situation and calm down until I can talk in a calm manner. As a mom with rowdy kids, that is very important. I think yelling at kids is both abusive and counterproductive. If either my husband or I get mad, one of us will go on a car ride to cool our tempers before discussing the issue again. Once we talk in a calm manner, giving each other turns to talk and actually listening, we usually come to a mutual understanding. Then it's time for the fun part, making up, which makes us feel closer than even before the fight. If my husband is more snippy than usual, I stop and wonder if we've not had enough alone time lately. That can cause people to get a little agitated. If you see a married couple with kids arguing, it may be because they really badly need a date night.Here is what I consider nagging. It is when a person, usually the wife but sometimes the husband, repeatedly whines at the other for not doing a specific job. The other person might be playing video games and tuning the other person out as annoying background noise. I can be guilty of nagging about the yard needing to be mowed. I would do it myself but I can't leave the kids alone in the house to do it. I don't think it's safe to mow if they're in the yard either, because they're too small to know to stay away from the mower. Given a choice, my husband prefers to mow rather than watch the kids. Nagging never works to motivate my husband, so if our yard looks too bad, I will hire some guys to come do our yard for $50. Since we're on a budget, that is a last resort. I just don't want to get a citation from the city for letting our yard become a jungle. I have also just went outside and started mowing without a word, so my husband had no choice but to take care of the kids inside while I mow outside. I change the baby's diapers and make sure everyone's fed before, though, to make it easier on my husband.Sorry to write such a windy response. I just have a lot of feelings on nagging. I hate to be nagged and I hate to nag, but sometimes I do it out of desperation. I mostly wanted people to understand that nagging is something many wives do only as a last resort.
>Kendra, verbal abuse isn't "showing anger." A person is allowed to express feelings, even extreme anger. We don't need to talk to each other like muppets on Sesame Street to avoid being abusive.Verbal abuse is when words are used to injure rather than communicate. There is a line between communicating "I am really angry and frustrated that you cheated on me and lied about it" and hurting the cheater with a verbal barrage in order to extract some measure of revenge.
>I'm glad my experience with sexual assault occurred later in life, and was relatively mild compared to some, so Discount's threatening language was not overwhelmingly triggering for me. It's sad that many women cannot say the same thing–hell, it's sad that I feel HAPPY about experiencing a sexual assault that was only mildly traumatizing. Discount's language towards me when I stated my harmless intent to use his language to demonstrate the hatefulness of the MRA movement definitely qualifies as verbal abuse. Had I been a survivor of a more serious sexual assault or rape, his verbal abuse would have been even more hurtful and frightening than it was. You never know where a person is coming from.
>Ion probably goes to NAACP meetings, shoulders his way to the front of the line, and says, "Whenever a white person has a concern, he's "whining" or is a "drama queen". But when a black person says something? Ohh, you better believe it's important." Ion doesn't deserve consideration. In the action movie heroine thread, he's accused women of being drunk, liars, frothing nut jobs because they called him on his bullshit. He's shocked, shocked! that calling women names is not getting him love and attention.
>If a black guy accused white people of "whining" every time they had a concern, sure I'd say that. And I don't see where I would be wrong. Anyway, Ginny, I know you love me, but let's keep our sordid affair confined to one thread, shall we?Kendra: That's a good point. I see nagging as a failure in communication, which can be anyone's fault. Someone wants something to be done but can't communicate it effectively, or the other person doesn't understand – or care. Rather than nag repeatedly, it's always better to try to explain to the other person why it's important to you that this or that be done. As you observed, nagging is rarely an effective motivator.Verbal abuse on the other hand is malicious, designed to hurt the target, to lower their self-esteem. This is how I believe the MRAs interpreted it in the original article: the wife yelling at the husband because he wasn't doing a good enough job, the implication being that *he* wasn't good enough. They went overboard with it, I agree.
>"Katz said… It's not really Eat, Pray, Love for us married seahags – it's BEAT, PREY, LEAVE!"For us single-ish pandas it's EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES
>Discount should have explained that his comments were not intended to be factual statements.
>@Avicenna, ah, you are british. Well, it could be the case that such a discrepancy happens in the UK or it could not, I don't know British law and courts as well as US ones. However, in the US, where many of these MRAs are, it actually is the case that very few men ask for primary custody. It is a cultural default where women are the vast majority of primary caretakers before divorce and generally just remain so after divorce, not a legal one. As to mediation, this is a relatively new field in the US. As I understand it, European countries are more likely to have legally binding mediation agreements than US jurisdictions. The few districts in the US that like legally binding mediation often treat it as a type of out of court settlement or require a final approval by the family court judge. US legally binding mediations involve lawyers, courts, and the whole mess usually (the mediator is often yet another lawyer).
>@SandyVerbal abuse is when words are used to injure rather than communicate. There is a line between communicating "I am really angry and frustrated that you cheated on me and lied about it" and hurting the cheater with a verbal barrage in order to extract some measure of revenge. This is along the lines of marriage researcher John Gottman's distinction between a complaint and criticism. A complaint is a statement that addresses the person's behavior (i.e., "I don't like it when you forget to do the dishes. Please try to remember to do them in the future"). A criticism, on the other hand, is an attack on the person's character ("you forgot to do the dishes AGAIN! What is wrong with you? Were you raised by wolves?). Needless to say, complaint-based conversations tend to be more productive than those based on criticism, which are very damaging to a relationship.